I know I have it. My much-publicized bouts with pancreatitis were a scary delivery of mortality-related information. I was always at least a little ashamed that it took me three mysterious hospitalizations in coma and the recovery for same before I could say I needed to beat this thing and not end up in the hospital, where they would probably kill me.

I feel as if I have won now; any medical problems I may have are actually pretty minor.

Still I have always empathized with people like Frank Sinatra, who, when asked what he wanted on his 80th birthday answered “another birthday.”

I need to stay around as long as I can to see what happens next. The life of the universe that surrounds me is certainly not a closed book.

I do not want my life to become a closed book.

I remember back in prep school I took some “special” courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I remember hearing that they were studying humans on a hypocaloric (low-calorie) diet. People came to M.I.T. to pick up premeasured portions of food, and you absolutely could not eat anything that had not been premeasured, but you were supposed to live longer.

My then-grossly-overweight self was interested already in prolonging my life, and in the study. Although I still remember my mother’s very unscientific arguments against it (something about the delights of eating your fill and the joy of midnight refrigerator raids) the idea stood with me.

I still want to live long.

This team seems to have nailed the reason why this sort of thing works. With lower calorie (and lower fat) diets, there is a different set of bacteria in the urine and from that they deduced, in the gut. The gut becomes less permeable to toxins associated with inflammation, which is associated with numerous chronic illnesses that shorten life.

At one point I was quite friendly with an alternative physician who seemed to tell me that almost everybody (including me) had “leaky gut syndrome,” something he seemed to diagnose by almost mystical means. Now, for the first time, I wonder if he was right.

The serum amount of lipopolysaccharide binding protein goes down. This means that one could actually be reducing the amount of antigenic material (read “material capable of getting an antibody type reaction from the body”) in the gut which could make people healthier and make them live longer.

I think this is the ultimate “less is more.”

My mother had, what I realize now, was a pressured marriage. She took a real joy in the satiation of food, and in her midnight refrigerator raids. She always made her own choices. I always gave her the very best science I could scrape up, although her pantry full of unopened nutritional supplements which I had sent her testified to her ultimate lack of confidence in whatever science I had tried to give her.

Me — in my quest to log in as many more birthdays as possible –I have become surely desirous of increased birthdays, also a user of probiotics. Genus Lactobacillus seems to be correlated with increased lifespans and I have surely snarfed my share of that.

It may not be exactly Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth, but it may be the closest I have ever seen.

First there is the beauty, glamor and sexuality crowd. This is by far the most numerous and also the least successful. Appealing to folks who are desperate to look hot at the beach in a new bikini, or who want to fit into a smaller size dress or pair of jeans is the focus of most magazines, television and especially weigh-loss products.

These folks are interested in getting rid of five to twenty pounds and usually want immediate results.

On the other hand is the health and well-being crowd.

That is the focus of this web site.

I myself have lost (as of this writing) over 160 lbs and still have just a little ways to go. The methods I talk about are aimed at the people who need to lose 100 lbs or more.

You’ve surely heard of or even seen people who weigh 300, 400, 500 lbs or even more. There are magazine and television stories about people so huge that they can’t leave the house or apartment where they live. They must lie in bed.

That ain’t living, friends.

People like that really aren’t primarily worried about looking attractive to the opposite sex or fitting into the latest fashions.

These people are afraid for their lives. And you don’t have to have 20 years of medical school to know that obese people just don’t live as long as “normal” people.

We are fighting for our lives. We are whipped around by media who are commercial driven, and government agencies who are driven by special interest groups trying to get favorable legislation.

We are fed myths and outright lies. The people we accept as gurus and authority figures are puppets who read off of cue cards. They cannot tell us what we really need to know.

This program is for those who desperately want to live, who want a better quality of life, who want to be able to go places and do things that “normal” people do.

That is why I call my program Massive Weight Loss.

If you must lose weight before the surgeon will operate on your knee or back —

If you must lose weight so you can conceive and safely deliver a healthy child —

If you must lose weight so you can fit into an automobile or an airplane seat or get on a city bus —

But can’t

This is for you.

Welcome … I look foward to getting to know you and helping you learn how you can control your weight, your health and your life.

When people who hadn’t seen me for a while learned how much weight I’d lost, the first question was invariably — “How did you do that?”

I’m very open. There is no deep dark secret, no magic bullet, no deal with the Devil. You don’t have to be a medical doctor and you don’t have to know about nutrition and exercise and all that stuff. Most of it is nonsense, anyway.

But what I know for certain is that anything is difficult to do alone. And losing weight — especially a large amount of weight — is probably the toughest.

If you know what to do — you still may not do it. Or you may try some intuitive short-cuts that are actually counter-productive. You may lose your momentum and get depressed.

Support groups have been successfully utilized in a great many areas. People getting together for a common cause gain synergy — the multiplication of success the exceeds the simple adding of more effort.

Keeping in touch with others who are doing what you are doing, or who have gone through what you’ve gone through, or are suffering doubts and need a bit of cheerleading will help you as much as it helps them.

Utilizing the power of the internet for discussions, audio and video demonstrations and all the other wonderful things technology has made available gives us some powerful tools to achieve what might be considered impossible under any other circumstances.

Likewise, having a knowledgable person who has been there and done that (that would be Moi) will guide you through the misinformation and disinformation and politically correct blather that accumulates from the mass media and the World Wide Web.

I urge you to sign up and join us — It is absolutely free and you can sign out any time you want.

If you want to succeed, I want you to succeed. Let’s all work together.

I wrote this particular paragraph in mid July — but you may be reading it months or even years later.

It doesn’t matter. Not one bit.

If you are determined that you must lose a bunch of weight, you can’t put it off. It won’t be any harder or any easier at any other time.

You know from years of frustration — there is no good time to start a diet.

There may be major holidays coming up, family gatherings, maybe a long-planned trip, or final school tests, or work deadlines.

There’s always something, isn’t there?

I realized that, of course. I knew that diets don’t work. I knew that making drastic changes to your lifestyle could be impossible. I knew that whatever your intentions, there would always be an excuse why you just couldn’t get started right now.

And we all know that tomorrow never comes.

That’s why I devised a common sense method that doesn’t require you to eliminate some foods and add others that you might not enjoy. I know that if you are restricted in how much you can eat and what types of things you can eat, that your diet is doomed from the start.

I know that your job doesn’t stop, and your family obligations won’t go away, and there is enough stress and frustration in everyday life without getting involved in the “dreaded diet mode.”

So no matter what is going on — you can start immediately. No waiting until first of the year, or your next birthday, or until your pain-in-the-neck relatives go home, or you have a two-week vacation.

Some people have trouble dieting and exercising because of where they live — or at least they think they do.

The reality is that I did what most people — even doctors — consider impossible and I did it while traveling widely around the USA.

I’m originally from Chelsea, MA — a suburb of Boston. I gained weight steadily throughout my life as I lived in France for seven years, went to specialty training in medical residencies and fellowships in such places as Cincinnati, Fargo, Minneapolis, Edmonton and Wichita.

I joined the Army and did my hitch in North Carolina. When I got married, my husband and I lived in Oklahoma City and Palm Springs, California, Las Vegas and San Diego.

I easily gained weight no matter where I went.

But when I decided it was past the time when I should be losing weight, I found I could do it no matter how much I traveled.

You see, I’m a unique kind of professional, and earned my name The Renegade Doctor. I don’t sit in an office or stand over an operating table. I’m out getting to the people who need me, and I’ve got people who will travel to wherever I am so I can take care of them.

During the nearly three years I let my weight drop away, I spent time in San Diego, Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Anaheim, Fresno, and quite a few other towns I can’t take time to write down at the moment.

I took trips across the country, with airline food and hotel food and all kinds of choices facing me.

Yet I knew what I had to do and how to do it. I could do it anywhere.

So please don’t fool yourself that you can’t lose massive amounts of weight unless you are strapped down to a hospital bed and fed liquid nutrients through a tube.

Anybody else in my condition would have been classified as “hopeless.”

I was over 55 years old. I weighed somewhere around 340 lbs (I don’t know because no scale was able to measure anything over 300). I had severe medical problems and had even been hospitalized three times in life-threatening comas. Each time, I was given less than 50% chance of waking — of living.

Yet today I weigh less than half of what I did then — only slightly over two years ago. My blood pressure was sky high — now it is normal. My blood sugar was dangerously diabetic — now it is normal. My triglycerides were so high, I was a walking stroke-risk — now they are normal.

If someone with that many strikes against her can safely lose weight and become “normal” — then I believe anybody can.

And I didn’t have to go on a restrictive diet, or endanger my health with prescription diet drugs, or get gastric bypass surgery. I didn’t even have to wear myself out with exercise — although I found the energy to indulge my love of dancing. Good exercise, but really just fun and games for me!